But if she was going to do this, she should do it right, raw nerves or no. So she sat and twitched, every sense quivering, until dusk came and she could approach the town without being seen.
Movement was a relief, the distractions of purpose allowing her to push the feelings to one side, where they remained but did not get in the way. She could concentrate on her more immediate senses and finally peel the cover from whatever it was that Miriam and Isaac and the others had not told her.
The first thing she saw was an adolescent boy chopping wood. That would have been troubling enough by itself—Dian winced every time the heavy double-bitted ax flew down toward his fragile boot—but then a woman came out of the nearby house and, instead of taking the dangerous object away from him, she merely gathered up the split logs and went back inside.
Five minutes later, a heavily dressed person carrying a rifle came down the lane toward the wood-chopper. Dian’s first reaction was of relief, that one of the village guards would now intervene with a scolding, but the guard merely greeted the boy, exchanged a few words, and went on.
Worse yet, the guard’s voice had been far too low to belong to a woman.
And it went downhill from there.
When she’d first laid eyes on these people back in August, Dian’s immediate reaction had been how eerily like one of Kirsten’s tales they were, riding blithely through the hazards of the countryside with a couple of menfolk. That night in their village, watching and listening, her underlying reaction was precisely the same: who did these people think they were, residents of that safe haven Before, the twentieth century? Sure, boys wanted to flail away at frozen wood with razor-sharp axes and men wanted to be in the front lines with the guns, but how could that be permitted? Axes slipped, enemies shot back. Even small cuts turned septic, and the world Dian knew could not afford to lose even one man through carelessness, not when males died as fast as they did through the myriad diseases of infancy.
Yet here were men, carrying guns and acting as if the past fifty years had never happened. They even moved differently.
A scant half hour of this, and Dian had to retreat. Taking care to move only where others had trod the snow, she walked out of the village until she came across a rough shed filled with firewood. She was not hungry, but she made herself eat and drink, and when she had put together her thoughts, she returned for a more methodical survey of the village.
It was the dinner hour, and most of the houses were bright, warm beacons in the darkness. Most of them had men in residence, and a high number appeared to have only one wife. Miriam’s claim of nearly a third male population was not too much of an exaggeration.
As with the Valley, houses staggered their dinner hours to accommodate the shifts for the night watch. Around seven o’clock, three heavily bundled figures carrying guns came down the road Dian had retreated up. One of them walked up to a house whose family had just finished their meal, knocked and entered, and came out two minutes later without the gun. On the guard’s heels came a similarly bundled woman, calling good-byes into the house. She slung the rifle over her bulky shoulder and pulled on a pair of gloves. The day guard continued down the row of houses until she came to one where the windows showed a neatly set table and last-minute preparations in the kitchen.
A few minutes later, the solitary guard was joined by two others, and they went back the way the first three had come. Dian stayed where she was, among the branches of a yew tree, and sure enough, half an hour later the same ritual was repeated with the guards from the other side.
She could not be sure, but of the six guards, three had seemed to be men.
As she prepared to move her position, the door of the house opposite came slowly open, and out stepped a toddler: a boy child. He was lightly dressed and wore only soft leather slippers on his feet, but he clearly had a purpose, for he sat down to negotiate the three steps from the porch and set off down the muddy road.
A girl toddler would have been bad enough, but watching idly as a boy was swallowed by the dark was agony. It was all Dian could do not to go after him, but she really did not want to immerse herself in the lengthy process of making her presence known, especially with the sensations of impending disaster plucking at her skin. She watched the child closely, knowing someone would notice the open door in a moment, knowing the child was not about to wander off into the woods, but scarcely able to breathe while he was out there.
No one came. The open door continued to pour light and warmth into the night, the toddler stumped away down the deserted road, and Dian began to moan with tension. All right, she finally decided; give the kid until the last house before the road bends, and if they haven’t spotted him, go after him.
The tiny figure closed in on the bend in the road; the bright happy houses on either side continued their nightly revelries; the house opposite poured its life out unknowing; and at last, one split second before Dian stepped out from the thick branches, she heard an exclamation from the hallway. A girl of about fifteen pulled the door fully open, revealing an entrance hallway with a braided rug and mirror. She peered out, then stepped back in and shouted over her shoulder. Turmoil erupted: women and men spilled into the hallway and out onto the porch, lights shifted through the dark rooms of the house, searching the upstairs rooms. The child was still there, squatting in the road, but in a minute he would not be.
Finally, the adults came out, three of them, pulling on coats and boots, holding lamps and lights, conferring and peering until Dian felt like shouting at them, “He’s down there!”
And then a small sound came through the frigid air, and all three whirled in the child’s direction. Two of them set off at a run, and Dian dropped her head into her hands, light-headed with relief. She barely heard them return, the child crying now at his cold feet, the adults torn between sympathy and recrimination.
How could they live like that?
And more immediate, how could the Valley risk the consequences of allowing that casual attitude so near? It was hard enough to soothe and distract the Valley’s menfolk into safer paths; with this degree of freedom on their very doorstep, how long would it be before young Salvador pressed to join the guards, or twelve-year-old Harry ran away to the woods for a hunting trip? Before Peter refused to go to the caves in an emergency?
No wonder Miriam hadn’t told them everything.
And Isaac . . . That little deception about archery skills was the least of it.
She’d seen enough to know what the problems were. Now she had to decide: were they dangerous enough to require an immediate ban? Or did fairness, and a recognition of the benefits these people would bring, require that she give them an ultimatum?
If she did that, if she stood up now and found Miriam and told her, “We’ll let you come to us if you can find a way to keep our menfolk safe from your irresponsible attitudes,” what would these people do? Was it even possible to reshape the ingrained habits and attitudes of an entire village?
She didn’t think so.
Everyone assumed that someday the viruses would lose their potency and men would slowly return to their previous numbers. Alongside this came the acceptance that menfolk would then take back some of their traditional authority; indeed, nearly every woman Dian knew secretly longed to see an adolescent boy freely testing his limits and wished to live among men who didn’t have to watch their every step for the benefit of their community.
Which might explain why this village was a throwback in its social structure: its freakish numbers had not required them to accept the immense changes the rest of the world had been forced to make.
However, Dian did not think that the rest of the world was about to catch up to these numbers anytime soon. And inviting the attitudes of freedom could prove a contagion with disastrous results.
She stood among the dark branches, the cold eating into her bones as she tried to decide what to do: show herself and deny these people the Valley, or consult with Judith first and, if Judith agreed the risk w
as too great, then get a message to them some way—sending Sonja home would do it nicely.
She might have had an easier time deciding if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with the ever-mounting prickly feeling running up and down her spine. It was hard to think rationally. But really, did she absolutely have to do this now? Could she think about it and come back? Talk about it with Robin, maybe?
The more she considered this scenario, the better she liked it. Robin was a man who cut wood and carried a gun, and although she was not entirely comfortable with either of those things and did not completely understand why he needed to be alone, she did trust him enough to be willing to talk this over with him.
As if to force her hand, two women came out of a house, attracted by the commotion of the rescued toddler; one of them was Miriam. The adults called back and forth, the child began to cry in earnest, and they all retreated into their houses. The doors closed, leaving the street deserted and Dian still silently in her place of hiding.
Yes, she seemed to have decided to think about this for a while.
One thing she would do before she left. She took from her pocket an object she had prepared back at Robin’s, a carefully split walnut with a note inside, sealed shut and coated with wax, then bound all over with a length of thin wire coated in red plastic, salvage from an old telephone line. She chose a snowdrift she thought likely to last until spring, against one side of a picket fence, and dug down to bind the bright wire to the slat. It would be noticed the instant the snow receded. The note read simply: Dian was here.
She dusted the snow back into place and stood back to admire her work. The revelation that the fox-faced Syl had spied on the Valley right under her nose had rankled for weeks. This should pay her back, if Dian decided not to return. And as she turned to pick her way back into the woods behind the houses, she suddenly realized where the tiny woman had picked up her competence in the woods. Syl was “the girl” who had blackmailed Robin into teaching her tracking skills. She smiled, imagining the woman’s face when the brightly wired walnut message appeared in the spring.
Once away from fear of detection, however, her boots crunching softly through unbroken snow, Dian’s smile faded. The incipient panic played at the ends of her nerves, building and flooding in tenfold; by the time she found Tomas and Simon in their makeshift shelter, she was near to running through the night forest. She also knew that the nameless threat concerned either Robin or Isaac. If Isaac, there was not a thing she could do, but Robin . . . Without pausing for food or sleep, she stripped off Simon’s blanket and threw the saddle over his back, relying on moonlight, memory, and Tomas’s senses to keep to the path.
It had taken her two and a half days to reach the village. On the return trip she was forced to lay over when the moon went in, when she realized she was getting lost, but in the gray predawn she was on the path again, unmindful of the threat of other travelers, pushing herself and her animals. They slid over the top of the last ridge just a bit after noon on the second day; Dian smelled it before she could see it.
Smoke lay heavy in the air. Tomas’s hackles went up and she had to call him back to her side, where he paced, stiff-legged, a growl rumbling in his chest. She dismounted well back from the clearing, but she need not have worried; the intruders were long gone.
The barn had collapsed, the cabin was a crackling black skeleton; Robin’s unburned possessions lay scattered across an expanse of slowly refreezing mud that four days before had been clean snow. Glass shards sparkled in the sunlight; half the greenhouse panes had melted, sagging and dripping back from the great heat of the burning cabin. Broken dishes lay in heaps, a pan lid had lodged in the branches of a huckleberry bush, the beautiful woolen blanket from Robin’s bed lay torn and trampled at the base of a tree. And brooding over it all, the blackened stones of the chimney and a few stinking beams that clung precariously together.
She walked forward slowly, but there was no body among the ashes, no smell of burnt flesh to give the remains an even more nauseating undertone. Near the barn she found a manure shovel with a smear of blood on one end and picked it up, sharply gratified to see strange hairs, bright blond in color: Robin had not gone without a fight.
But if they’d surprised him in the barn, why hadn’t he had his handgun with him?
Because he’d gotten out of the habit of wearing the thing, her mind answered, with you here to back him up. She dropped the shovel as if it had bitten her.
She went over to the giant slab of granite that had been Robin’s porch step and found it still warm from the fire. She found something else as well: after she’d been sitting there for a while, she became aware of faint movement and looked down to see Cat, her odd gray-brown fur filthy and scorched in places but relatively uninjured. Dian pulled off her glove and held out her hand, and a minute later the fur brushed against it. Cat crawled into her lap, head buried in Dian’s coat, purring desperately. She even stayed there when Tomas came over and nudged her with his nose.
At Dian’s feet lay one of Robin’s delicate herb baskets, undamaged although its contents had spilled out onto the ground. Turning it over in her hands, she looked up and, halfway between the house and the barn, saw something that made her heart stop in her chest. She put the cat down and walked numbly around the rough circle of exposed earth to stand staring blankly at the charred remains of Robin’s books. The murdered authors of a world gone past lay cremated, deliberately piled up and set aflame. She knew the intruders for what they were, and she felt the rage begin. It grew like the growl in Tomas’s chest, this revulsion and fury at life’s Destroyers. These were not human beings who had been here, though they walked on two feet. These beings were a throwback, the spawn of the creatures who had brought on the Bad Times, who had killed Kirsten’s father and thousands more in their riots, who had poisoned water supplies and burned libraries and set bombs and murdered anyone tainted by a connection with technology and education. Great as her rage was over Robin, her revulsion at the way he had been taken was even greater. She dropped the small basket and sprinted for her horse, consumed by the need for venting her fury.
When her hand was on the pommel, however, she did not mount. A small cold voice spoke through the heat and asked her what she would do if they did not have Robin when she caught up with them. Would she be able to meet them on their own level and exterminate them regardless? Or would she be forced to back off and return here to a very cold trail? Should she even go after him at all? She stood for several minutes leaning against the saddle, willing the voice of reason away, wanting to be gone. In the end, though, cursing herself under her breath, she removed the bridle so Simon could scrape in the snow for grass and went to find a hefty branch to sort through the smoldering remains.
Ninety minutes, a sliced finger, and numerous painful little burns later, Dian was satisfied that Robin’s body was indeed not here. With a degree of grim humor she gathered together some of the larger scraps of unburned wood and lit them a second time, setting Robin’s largest pan, dented but whole and filled with ash-flecked snow, onto the resulting fire. While the water heated, she scrubbed her face and blackened hands with snow and set off in a wide circle, scouring the hillside for any trace of Robin, any hint that he might have gotten away. There were none. The pan sent a geyser of steam into the air, and Dian poured the boiling water into the thermal jug, threw in a few tea leaves, screwed in Isaac’s wooden stopper with care, and stood up. Her eyes went to Tomas, lying on the warm granite-slab step, Cat tucked fastidiously against his flank. The dog’s head was between his paws, and he was watching her intently.
First, Cat. Dian spent a few minutes further collapsing the inner wall of the greenhouse, dragging some branches over to shut it off. It would be cold, but protected. She went back to the slab and stroked the frazzled fur. “Sorry, lady, but you’re going to have to fend for yourself. You can get in out of the cold in the greenhouse, and there’ll still be plenty of mice near the barn.” Dian gathered up what few edible bits of
scorched food she could find, then retrieved the sad heap of Robin’s blanket and dropped it in front of the dog.
“Tomas, find Robin. Go to Robin.”
Dian was surprised at the speed of his response—he seemed almost to have been waiting for just that command. Certainly he did not bother to sniff at the blanket but rose and trotted off in the direction of the footprints, and her heart lifted a bit at this appearance of Culum’s lightning intelligence and wisdom in his son. She picked up the blanket, shook it out carefully, and folded it away into her saddlebag. On another whim she included the small basket of herbs. Sentimentality, perhaps, but it was a light enough thing to carry; the blanket, anyway, might come in useful. She bridled the horse, mounted, and followed Tomas down the hill.
Dian had not even stopped to consider the potential consequences of going after Robin. She owed him a life, and to do otherwise was unthinkable. Nor did she reconsider her actions now, merely putting out of her mind—or, at any rate, putting in the back of her mind—the niggling voice that asked, But you’re pregnant now, and walking into danger: do you owe him two lives? She rode along immersed in what her eyes were seeing, all her attention on the path of trampled snow that stretched before her. There were eleven horses, she decided, five of them being led. Two would be those that belonged to the woman who had killed, and been killed by, Culum; two would probably be the gang’s own packhorses. She would assume that the fifth horse they led bore Robin, captive but alive and no doubt as well as they could keep him: Destroyers might burn books, but a healthy man would be a commodity too valuable to risk. That meant six strangers, which matched the footprints at the cabin. They were apparently unconcerned with anyone wanting to follow them, for they were making no attempt to conceal their tracks. Good. Even better was the news that the lead rider left occasional spots of blood in the snow.
Califia's Daughters Page 27